This quarter's Carleton College Voice includes an interview with me by the lovely Danny LaChance '01. The picture above was an outtake from my photo shoot with the equally lovely Metin Oner at the Cloisters.
The hat I'm wearing in the picture on the Carleton page has been lost to me, alas -- a sincere "alas" there, as I really loved that hat: pink wool, with a flower. So I'm grateful to have a good picture of me in it, and grateful to Carleton for the nice attention.
ETA, 3/26/08: When I was writing up this post last night, I forgot to mention what I was really excited to talk about in the interview: mechanics -- that is, punctuation, capitalization, spacing. As my authors can attest, I am mildly obsessed with these things, because, as Isaac Babel said, "No steel can pierce the heart of man as icily as a full stop placed at the right moment." I think of that cold breath in the middle of Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias," how you hear the futility of human ambitions and the silence of all the ages in the pause before "Nothing beside remains." Or, closer to home, in our incredible In the Shadow of the Ark by Anne Provoost -- the Noah's Ark story told from the point of view of a girl who stows away on the boat -- one polytheistic character eventually comes to accept Noah's Unnameable and singular god, and we signified that change by making "him" (in reference to God) uppercase when that character talked about Him: the tiniest of differences conveying this entire shift in the character's philosophy. I love this kind of stuff, and I was thrilled to get to talk about that in relation to HP, where much thought and discussion went into capping Cloak vs. Wand and Stone or the right circumstances for a colon vs. a semicolon. . . . While I do try to move faster than this, I admit that like Oscar Wilde, I can spend all morning putting in a comma, and all afternoon taking it out again.